You no longer have an excuse to keep using wired headphones with your iPhone. TicPods Free are the affordable wireless earbuds that combine awesome audio with noise cancellation and intuitive touch controls.

Speaking to The Guardian , Professor John McGeehan, who led the research from the University of Portsmouth, said the discovery was "a bit of a shock," but that it could have a significant impact on the mounting global plastics problem. PET bottles that are currently recycled can only be turned into fibers for clothing and carpets. The mutant enzyme could be used to turn plastic back into its original components. "It means we won't need to dig up any more oil and, fundamentally, it should reduce the amount of plastic in the environment," said McGeehan.

The company will launch the premium subscription service in an attempt to generate more revenue from online content and services, reports Bloomberg . The service will reportedly use technology from Texture, a magazine subscription service Apple bought last month. Apple will integrate Texture’s technology into the Apple News app with a premium subscription to the service giving users access to digital magazines. Revenue will be shared among magazine publishers that agree to be part of the new service. There’s no word on what the news service could cost, but Texture gave users access to over 200 publications for $9.99 a month. Apple’s news subscription service is expected to launch within the next year. MG

One passenger, Marty Martinez of Dallas, went live on Facebook ahead of the emergency landing. Though much of the video is garbled, the video shows Martinez wearing an oxygen mask. In the comments, he shared harrowing details from the moment after the window shattered next to a passenger.

Docs and emails show Cambridge Analytica's plans, now on hold, to launch its own ICO for a token aiming to help people store and sell their online personal data (New York Times)
http://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/technology/cambridge-analytica-initial-coin-offering.html … http://www.techmeme.com/180417/p29#a180417p29 …

Last weekend, two black men in Philadelphia were arrested in a Starbucks for sitting at a table. This turned into a media firestorm, highlighting injustices people of color face every day–even when they’re just sitting quietly at a café.

Besides, Blackhawk looks like it won't be ready for a little while yet. There's no start date or release date. Plus, Warner Bros. already has plenty of other DC projects in the pipeline including a Birds of Prey film , which picked up a new director earlier today.

The methodology is more of a philosophy than a prescription, and there are different ways of approaching it. For most companies, the question is no longer, "Should we use Waterfall or Agile for this project?" but instead, "Which Agile framework and practices can be applied to produce the highest value?" Hyde said. "The skill is choosing between frameworks and tailoring them to enable high-performance teams to deliver frequent value for the business reliably," he added.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously voted today to approve the ordinance that looks to regulate electric scooters in San Francisco. The ordinance seeks to establish regulation and a permitting process that would enable the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency or Department of Public Works to take action against scooters from companies that don’t have an official permit from the city.

All jokes aside, Daniels and her attorney are actively pursuing the threat and intimidation, especially as it relates to Trump and the payout Daniels received from Trump's personal attorney, Michael Cohen, in the fall of 2016 before the election.

"The membership structure and meeting format of the BDAC has skewed the drafting of the proposed recommendations towards industry priorities without regard for a true public-private partnership," Gamino wrote. "These circumstances give me no choice but to step away from this committee in order to direct the City's energy and resources to alternative forums that provide more productive opportunities for achieving the kind of cooperative progress in advancing broadband deployment in the public interest."

You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history.
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Whatever the cause, the failure underscores the challenges of offering such a vital government service online. The IRS' Direct Pay system not only has to cope with tremendous demand from taxpayers (5 million people filed returns at the last moment in 2017), but protect against hacks and brute force denial-of-service attacks. That's a daunting challenge for any organization -- and when the IRS has a less than stellar track record on this front, it's no exception to the rule.

This upcoming software comes just a short while after Apple publicly released iOS 11.3, which brought with it ARKit 1.5, new Animoji, the battery health feature for iOS devices, and more. As a result, it is likely that iOS 11.4 does not bear any major forward facing features for the end user, and is more than likely meant to address behind-the-scenes issues, especially any that might have cropped up since the public launch of iOS 11.3 last week.

Apple's HomePod delivers superb sound quality, gives you access to Siri without using your iPhone, and lets you control your smart home devices through HomeKit. The $349 (£319, AU$499) smart speaker has a 4-inch high-excursion woofer, seven horn-loaded tweeters, and a six-microphone array (there's a seventh microphone). It offers both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity. To find out how Apple packed all this tech into a cylindrical speaker that resembles a 2013 Mac Pro (the trash can Mac) wrapped in cloth mesh, we cracked open the HomePod.

Given the number of PDF apps for the iPad, it may seem odd that I’m picking the native Files app here, but it’s the one I use. To mark up a PDF in Files app, you just start drawing on it. That’s it! There’s no need to enter an edit mode, or anything like that. Just tap the Apple Pencil onto the PDF you’re viewing in Files app, and you will draw a line. If you need to switch to a different pen, or change color, or add fancier markup, tap the little Markup icon at the top right of the screen.

The study from researchers at the International Computer Science Institute revealed that 57 percent of the 5,855 most popular free Android children's apps "are potentially in violation" of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act ( COPPA ), primarily due to their use of third-party software development kits.

The League’s algorithm quickly matched Wood, who’d been working in sales at Google and had just been admitted to Stanford University’s business school, with Tracy Thomas, an employee at a Bay Area startup with a wardrobe straight out of preppy clothier Vineyard Vines. Within a week, they’d arranged to meet at a tennis tournament. Sushi, drinks, and frozen yogurt followed. Three years later, they’re engaged and living in Los Angeles while Thomas wraps up his own business degree. “It was important to me that someone I was going on a date with was well-educated and driven, and had a lot of the same goals I did,” says Wood, who now runs a lifestyle blog and coaching service called Brains Over Blonde. “I have big career ambitions, and that had, in the past, intimidated—scared away—people I’d dated.”

With iOS 11 , Apple tweaks the Control Center so it now appears as a floating array of buttons, like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Brightness, Volume, and Music. Now you can also add certain icons to or remove them from Control Center so your favorite items appear. Let's check out the new Control Center to see how you can use it and tweak it.

It’s Tax Day, which means you have either submitted your tax forms and are downing milkshakes to dull the pain, or you just realized it’s Tax Day and are now frantically Googling “How late can you file your taxes?”

Picking a good passphrase is beyond the scope of this article. But once you have one that is both secure, and that you can remember, type it in. Then type it in again when prompted. You are now protected against cops using GrayKey. Instead of cracking your passcode in a matter of hours or days, they will now take weeks or months, or longer.

IRS e-filing system goes down on day of tax deadline https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/17/17248564/irs-direct-pay-online-payment-system-still-down-tax-day-filing?utm_campaign=theverge&utm_content=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter … pic.twitter.com/3CnMnaXfLO

Public records show that Apple now has about 70,000 square feet of office space leased at the Seattle location. It’ll have to buy up a lot more space if it wants to catch up to Google though. The search giant employs nearly 3,000 people in the area. Facebook has space for about 3,000 workers too.

"Try to avoid any contractual situation where you are held back from your ideas," he continued before dropping some very relatable Kanye proverbs: "distraction is the enemy of vision," and "sometimes you have to get rid of everything."

The PayPal Mafia—a term that's used with affection and awe in Silicon Valley—is defined as the Mountain View PayPal team either pre-IPO or pre-acquisition, depending on which founding member you ask. While those may seem like vastly different stages in a company's life, it's more like splitting hairs, as PayPal's IPO happened only a few months before it was acquired. Former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel estimates the PayPal Mafia to be around 220 people. The PayPal Mafia does not include the 700 person customer service operation that was running in Omaha, Nebraska at the time.

"While outdoors the level of activation is always changing in response to the light, so in most situations the lens isn’t in the darkest state. These lenses also fade back to clear quickly when you come inside. The activation and fade rates of ACUVUE® OASYS with Transitions® will typically be faster than glasses due to consistent human body temperature and the optimized photochromic additive. Because these lenses are constantly maintained at eye temperature, environmental temperature would have a minimal effect with on-eye photochromic performance (activation, darkness, and fade rates)."

The solution is Duck of the Day. A perfect Twitter account, Duck of the Day serves up an enjoyable image of a duck each day around the same time. The ducks hail from the University of York in England, and have been gracing feeds around the world since 2009. (There's also an official Duck of the Day website .)

Separately, I also heard from one of my contacts that Microsoft has moved the Skype consumer team under Outlook as part of phase 2 of the latest reorg. Gaurav Sareen is the Corporate Vice President currently in charge of Outlook, Yammer and Office 365 Groups. He is expected to add Skype consumer to his responsibilities, I believe.